Category: music

With recent merger announcements, it looks like the five major recording companies could become three. “If American and European regulators approve both the Sony-BMG and EMI-Warner mergers, about 75 percent of global music sales would be controlled by three companies. For a typical music shopper, that could well mean fewer new acts (since artist development is so expensive), fewer independent stores (since business with large chains is more cost-efficient), and more major-label product on the racks of remaining stores (since they’d be able to strong-arm retailers the way the big snack and soda companies do with delis).”

So you’ve decided to take the plunge and buy and download some classical music from one of the hot new legal paysites. First you’ve got to find it, writes Greg Sandow: “As I rooted around, I came across all the Beethoven sonatas in the old and greatly respected Artur Schnabel performances. All of them! Ninety-nine cents per track. There’s only one problem. What you get, when you look these up – and it’s the same on all three services I’ve mentioned – is a track listing. As follows (transcribed verbatim): 1 The Complete Piano Sonatas, I. Allegro/ 2 The Complete Piano Sonatas, II. Adagio…”

Wal-Mart is planning to launch an online music store. “It is unclear what Wal-Mart’s pricing strategy will be for music downloads. Prices on existing services range from 79 cents to 99 cents per song. But Wal-Mart, which accounts for roughly 20 percent of U.S. music sales, typically sells music at a loss to attract customers to its stores.”

Morten Lauridsen is one of the most performed composers in America. “Lauridsen’s music is sung in churches and concert halls throughout America and increasingly in Europe. Most critical attention to contemporary art music focuses on premieres by renowned orchestras or avant-garde instrumental specialists such as the Kronos Quartet. Yet their audiences are dwarfed by the number of Americans who listen to and perform choral music. More than 28 million Americans sing in a quarter-million choirs, most of them in churches but also in school and college ensembles–and their directors are hungry for new and challenging works that hone their singers’ skills, yet remain accessible to mass audiences.”

Christopher Hogwood laments the casual way opera directors edit and disfigure operas. “The great liberties taken in opera productions today are often laughable and ludicrous: think of Brünnhilde with her head in a paper bag or cleaning her teeth while Siegfried is declaiming his love, or of the chorus in Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera sitting on toilets. But such silliness is, strictly speaking, cosmetic: close your eyes and the music proceeds as intended, and eventually she removes the paper bag and they pull up their trousers. But amputate an aria, remove a recitative, reallocate an interval and, even with eyes closed, the structure wobbles fatally.”

Iraq’s National Symphony moves into a new home. “The 63-member orchestra met Friday with U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer III, who welcomed the musicians to their new practice space at the Baghdad Convention Center. The building is inside Baghdad’s ‘Green Zone,’ an area guarded by U.S. troops and surrounded by concrete walls, rolls of razor wire and sandbag bunkers.”

A London businessman is giving £20 million to be split between the Royal Opera House and the Wales Millennium Centre and form a partnership between the two. It is one of the largest single private donations ever made to the performing arts in the UK. “The gift comes with strings: as well as cooperating with one another, both will be expected to work with opera and ballet companies in South Africa”

A season after he took over as music director of the Berlin Philharmonic, Simon Rattle is bringing the orchestra to America. “Today’s Berlin, Rattle has found, is a lively, slightly dangerous place in which to live. The Russian Mafia, a holdover from the Cold War era, is still in evidence in this gateway to the East. In a strange way the BPO mirrors this rough-and-tumble society, he says. ‘They tend to hire musicians that other orchestras reject as being too extreme – people who are chamber musicians rather than orchestra musicians. One of them said to me, `Simon, we’re sick of experience. What we want is talent.’ However, because the Berlin Philharmonic of 2003 is more heterogeneous in its membership than ever before in its 121-year history does not mean it has lost its distinctive character.”

Anthony Tommasini reports that Simon Rattle’s first appearance with the Berlin Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall was a big success. “Judging by the smiles on the faces of the cellists as they plucked some pizzicato bass line in the slow movement, the way the violinists kept rising off their chairs as they dug into the rustic theme of the scherzo and the overall energy of the playing, it’s clear that the Berlin Philharmonic musicians are excited by their new conductor. So were the audiences at Carnegie Hall.”

After a $20 million renovation, the Kennedy Center Opera House is about to reopen. “The Washington Opera will resume performances there in the spring. In a typical year, the Opera House has 225 performances, attended by a total of 500,000 people. The renovations included a top-to-bottom cleaning, from the sprawling Austrian chandelier to the expanded orchestra pit. New features include a maple floor on the orchestra level. The red seats have been redone throughout the hall, along with cherry trim and arm rests.”